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12/1/2005

Emergence – Realities

Medusa Art Gallery, Athens

organised by Lina Tsikout

Babis Venetopoulos
Marigo Kassi
Vally Nomidou
Stergios Stamos

Last year the Medusa Art Gallery announced and started a series of exhibitions in collaboration with various curators. According to this project, every year one curator is invited to propose a specific subject and artists and prepare a show. In last year’s inaugural exhibition of this series, curator and art critic Efi Strousa presented the show Lies and Truths, with works by Giorgos Gyparakis, Anita Xanthou and Nakis Tastsioglou.

This year Medusa presents the exhibition Emergence – Realities, organised by Lina Tsikouta, Dr. of Art History and curator of the National Gallery. The title points to the processing of individual existential concerns and findings: of experienced situations and conditions of the mind and the soul which come to the surface through an inner processing. The problem of existence and the exploration of its meaning is the hub of the exhibition. “Emergence”, the first part of the title, reflects the artists’ choice of existential concerns and hence of their subjects, whereas “Realities” reflects the outcome of their approaches – the specific works, which constitute their own subjective realities. It is about the personalised, experienced reality of their existence.

The exhibition Emergence-Realities presents four contemporary artists: Babis Venetopoulos (1973), Marigo Kassi (1953), Vally Nomidou (1959) and Stergios Stamos (1964), who reveal and bring to the surface four different versions of their inner existential “realities”. In their order of presentation within the gallery, Marigo Kassi proposes an installation of handmade girls’ dresses made of paper and suspended from the ceiling of the front room, their soft rustle awakening childhood memories. This is about memory in the course of existence and the consciousness of time through it. In the inner room Vally Nomidou presents an environment with two life-size sculpted figures made of plasticised paper pulp. Two children, seated in entirely natural positions, seem to “endure” with their eyes closed, in a silent introspection of an existential process and in what their young age makes an antithetical aspect of self-awareness.

In the same room, Stergios Stamos creates an installation with a luminous Π-shape and a staircase inside it whose 9 steps move each at a different pace. The internal luminous sides of the Π carry excerpts from the Odyssey in ancient Greek, while a mirror high above multiplies the image. Through this non-figurative and purely conceptual way the artists ‘depicts’ –using text, motion and illusion– the Odyssey of Man, his conscience, his struggle and his wanderings.

Finally, Babis Venetopoulos, the youngest in this group, “adapts” a new version of his aesthetic view of incarceration, distortion and claustrophobia in a small storage space at the back of the room. Above all, he examines the effect of time on human existence: the perpetual passage from the young to the aged body and vice-versa; the wear of the body and the decline of the spirit. In this show he represents the existential aspect of anxiety and tragicalness.

The exhibition opens on Thursday, 13 January 2005 at 8.00 in the evening and closes on February 12. It is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue with theoretical texts and photographs of the works, and by a well-documented CD which shows the evolution of the artists’ careers and promotes the exhibition.

Image: Babis Venetopoulos, Birds, 2004

Dr. Lina Tsikouta
Art Historian
Curator at the National Gallery

Opening Reception 13 January 2005, 8 pm

MEDUSA ART GALLERY
7 Xenokratous Str., 10675 Athens, Greece

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